British Popular Customs, Present and Past: Illustrating the Social and Domestic Manners of the People. Arranged According to the Calendar of the Year.Thiselton-Dyer, T. F. (Thomas Firminger)
History
British Popular Customs, Present and Past: Illustrating the Social and Domestic Manners of the People. Arranged According to the Calendar of the Year.
Thiselton-Dyer, T. F. (Thomas Firminger)
Folklore -- Great Britain; Great Britain -- Social life and customs
The author of _Christian Sodality_, a collection of discourses, 1652,
says:--This day is called White or Low Sunday because in the Primitive
Church those neophytes that on Easter Eve were baptized and clad in
white garments did to-day put them off, with this admonition, that they
were to keep within them a perpetual candour of spirit, signified by the
_Agnus Dei_ hung about their necks, which, falling down upon their
breasts, put them in mind what innocent lambs they must be, now that of
sinful, high, and haughty men they were by baptism made low, and little
children of Almighty God, such as ought to retain in their manners and
lives the Paschal feasts which they had accomplished.
Seymour in his _Survey of London_ (1734, B. iv. p. 100) tells us that
the aldermen used to meet the Lord Mayor and sheriffs at St. Paul’s in
their scarlet gowns, furred, without their cloaks, to hear the sermon.
WALES.
Fenton in his _Tour through Pembrokeshire_ (1811, p. 495) alludes to the
game of _Knappan_ as being played at Pwlldu, in the parish of Penbedw,
on low Easter-day. He says the knappan was a ball of some hard wood, of
such a size as a man might hold in his hand, and was boiled in tallow to
make it slippery. The players at this game were very numerous,
frequently amounting to a thousand or fifteen hundred people, parish
against parish, hundred against hundred, and sometimes county against
county. When the company assembled, about one or two o’clock in the
afternoon, entirely naked, with the exception of a light pair of
breeches, a great shout was given as the signal to begin, and the ball
was hurled bolt upright into the air by one of the parties and at its
fall he that caught it hurled it towards the county or goal he played
for. The players consisted of horse and foot, who in the purest times of
the game never mixed, being governed by certain rules and regulations
that were never violated; but long before this game was disused various
abuses and disorders had crept into it, so that it served to inflame
every bad passion, engender revenge, foment private quarrels, and
stimulate even to bloodshed and murder.
APRIL 1.] ALL FOOLS’ DAY.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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